On November 17, 2022 Alice P. Cheng helped organize an event presented by the Alameda County Bar Association Racial Justice Taskforce and the Asian American Bar Association in collaboration with the Charles Houston Bar Association, California Association of Black Lawyers, and East Bay La Raza Lawyers Association.

Thank you to panel members Terrance Evans, Lisa Holder, Don Tamaki, and moderator Deborah Moss-West for sharing their knowledge on this highly important topic.

On the 25th of May, 2020, George Floyd’s murder, captured in an horrific 9 minutes and 29 seconds of video, triggered the largest protests in American history, and moved the Legislature to pass Secretary Shirley Weber’s bill creating the California Task Force to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans.

On June 1, 2022, the Task Force published a sweeping, nearly 500-page Report drawing a through-line from the harm of 250 years of slavery and racial terror, 90 years of Jim Crow exclusion, and decades more of continuing discrimination resulting in today’s outcomes which are at once shocking, but not surprising:

America is as segregated today as it was in the 1940’s. The historic exclusion of African Americans from equal education, employment, the benefits of the New Deal, federally insured home loans, access to suburbia, and other opportunities that created America’s middle class has resulted in White households having 9 times more assets than Black households, and huge disparities that persist in housing, homelessness, healthcare, policing, and criminal justice, and in almost all other aspects of American life.

California is the first and so far, the only state to shine a light on the cumulating and compounding consequences of this multi-generational harm. At this program, hear from two members of the Task Force about the report’s results and how the legal community can help.

Check out the Reparations Reports page here, with links to the Full Interim Report, the Executive Summary, Key Findings, and Preliminary Recommendations.